Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Corinthians · About this commentary
Light Out of Darkness
2 Corinthians 4:1-6
1 Therefore, seeing we have this ministry, even as we obtained mercy, we don’t faint. · WEB
Two reasons are given for not giving up, and between them stands the bluntest thing the letter says about why the message is refused.
Therefore, seeing we have this ministry, even as we obtained mercy, we don't faint.
The reason for not collapsing is placed outside the work itself. The ministry was received, and so was the mercy that put him in it — a man who did not appoint himself has no standing to resign. The verb reappears twelve verses later as a bracket around the whole passage 2 Corinthians 4:16.
Verse 2 lists what has been given up, and the list reads like the charges he was facing. The hidden things of shame, craftiness, handling the word of God deceitfully — the last being the same complaint as watering the wine 2 Corinthians 2:17. Against them he sets the manifestation of the truth, and a court of appeal that cannot be managed: every man's conscience in the sight of God.
Then verses 3 and 4, which pick up the veil and give it an owner. Even if our Good News is veiled, it is veiled in those who are dying, in whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving.
The veil of chapter 3 was over the mind; here something has put it there. What the blinding is designed to prevent is named exactly — that the light of the Good News of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn on them. Not to make them wicked, but to keep a light from rising.
That explanation is dangerous in one direction and Paul closes it off immediately. If refusal is caused by blinding, a preacher might conclude his own performance is irrelevant, or that his audience is at fault. Verse 5 blocks both: we don't preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake.
He puts himself under the people who were judging him. The word is the ordinary one for a household slave.
And verse 6 answers the blinding with the oldest act of God there is: it is God who said, "Light will shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts. The remedy for a mind that cannot see is not persuasion but creation — the sentence from the first page of Genesis, spoken again inside a person, and the light arrives in the face of Jesus Christ, which is where the chapter's argument about faces has been going.
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